To-Do List: Congress Comes Back, Rick Perry Does It Again

To know: Congress is heading back to Washington, where it will resume some of the same fights that it had last year … A member of the Syrian Parliament who defected to Egypt criticized Arab League monitors who were supposed to help quell the violence in his home country … Rescue operations are continuing on a cruise ship that ran aground off Italy … Wikipedia will go dark for twenty-four hours Wednesday in a protest against a bill under consideration in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

To read: The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Parkinson examines the reaction in Turkey to a comment Rick Perry made during Monday night’s Republican Presidential debate, when he (incorrectly) asserted that Turkey’s government is controlled by “what many perceive to be Islamic terrorists”:

Turkish and U.S. diplomats say they cannot remember a time when cooperation between Ankara and Washington was closer, citing that President Barack Obama called Turkey’s prime minister more than any other leader except Britain’s Prime Minister in 2011.

In the New York Times, Patricia Leigh Brown writes about Americans living in Mexico who cross the border daily in order to attend schools in the U.S.:

California teenagers start their mornings with crossing guards and school buses. Martha and her friends stand for hours in a human chain of 16,000 at the world’s busiest international land border. Cellphones in one hand and notebooks in the other, they wait again to cross on foot, fearing delays that could force them to miss a social studies final, oblivious to hawkers selling breakfast burritos or weary parents holding toddlers in pajamas.